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Who is Edward Snowden?

Last year, the Air Force considered blacklisting the company’s office in San Antonio over a leak. The incident involved a former Air Force officer hired by Booz Allen, who on his first day of work brought with him “sensitive,” non-public information regarding an upcoming Air Force contract.

Booz Allen employees accepted the information, which gave the company a “competitive advantage,” and used it in internal business presentations.

Six weeks later, the company’s lawyers became aware of the situation, according to the administrative agreement. The employee was fired, and the company did not participate in an Air Force competition it had been eyeing.

Still, the company did not formally disclose the incident to the Air Force. Instead, the agreement says, it was disclosed informally through voice mails and emails to Air Force contracting personnel.

After the Air Force proposed debarment for Booz Allen’s San Antonio office, the company conducted a broad investigation and agreed to put in place new ethics rules, as the Project on Government Oversight reported last year. It also paid the Air Force $65,000.

For Booz Allen, which derives 99 percent of its revenue from U.S. government agencies, the incident was a threat to its business, affecting “the ability of our San Antonio office to attain new government” contracts, as the company said in a filing last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the filing, the company acknowledged that protecting government secrets is key to the future of its business, which is dependent on U.S. intelligence agencies for about 23 percent of its revenue.

The “growth of our business” depends primarily “on our ability to be awarded work under U.S. government contracts,” the company said in its SEC filing. That relationship, it explained, could be damaged through “the mishandling or the perception of mishandling of sensitive information.”

Now, that scenario appears to be playing out. The company has been in the spotlight over its connection to leaks involving the National Security Agency that have dominated headlines around the world. Snowden, a Booz Allen employee working at the NSA, identified himself over the weekend as the source of the leaks to The Guardian and The Washington Post.

On Monday, Booz Allen stock fell more than 2.5 percent.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But, in a statement posted online on Sunday, it confirmed Snowden has been an employee for “less than 3 months, assigned to a team in Hawaii.”

“News reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm,” the company said.

In a statement, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said “the intelligence community is currently reviewing the damage that has been done by these recent disclosures,” and that “any person who has a security clearance knows that he or she has an obligation to protect classified information and abide by the law.”

For Booz Allen, the big question is whether the leak will translate into a long-term perception problem — or whether it will go down as an inevitable consequence of the massive expansion of U.S. intelligence operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

“Negative press reports regarding poor contract performance, employee misconduct, information security breaches, or other aspects of our business, or regarding government contractors generally, could harm our reputation,” the company said in its SEC filing.